‘Altruists’ Gets Ol’ College Try

A new play by Nicky Silver, who has made his mark with absurdist social satire, has opened in Santa Ana because a young director from Cal State Fullerton had an inside line on it--and because of Silver’s soft spot for young learners.

Todd Kulczyk got to know Silver and the play, “The Altruists,” two years ago while working as a student intern for the annual Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. Kulczyk, by luck of the draw, was assigned as production assistant to Silver, director David Warren and their cast as they prepared “The Altruists” for a staged reading.

It was Kulczyk’s first encounter with the work of Silver, the New York City playwright whose comedies “Pterodactyls” and “Raised in Captivity,” both off-Broadway successes, had West Coast premieres at South Coast in 1995.

Kulczyk, now a first-year grad student in a Cal State program that accepts only one directing student every two years, held onto his “Altruists” script and directed it as a theater department class exercise last fall. Now he is taking it public as one of the first productions at Cal State Fullerton’s new, 70-seat theater at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana.

When the university’s theater department sought performance rights for “The Altruists,” Silver had his agent grant them as a matter of course, even though the script remains unpublished.

“I always will let any college do a play of mine, wanting to be encouraging of young things and help them grow,” he said from his home in New York City. He was, however, peeved to learn that the spring season brochure published by Cal State Fullerton’s cultural events office advertised the show as the play’s West Coast premiere. That designation, he said, should be reserved only for a professional production in which he is directly involved (such as the world premiere of “The Altruists” last year at the Vineyard Theatre in New York, which has launched several of Silver’s plays). Subsequent Cal State fliers pertaining only to “The Altruists” have dropped the “premiere” designation.

Kulczyk, who hasn’t had any contact with Silver since the South Coast reading in 1999, says he was drawn to “The Altruists” by its farcical speed and frenzy. From what he knows of Silver, the main characters--a soap opera star and three left-wing activists who sponge from her so they can indulge in assorted political causes--have a bit of the author’s hyper-personal style. No one would want to pin Silver with any closer resemblance to his play’s characters: The so-called altruists turn out to be embodiments of breathtaking selfishness, injustice, hypocrisy and self-delusion.

“Playwrights bring a little bit of themselves to their work, and getting to know Nicky and his frantic, zany approach to life kind of helped mold the play for me,” Kulczyk said.

Kulczyk’s life lately has been proceeding at the speed of farce as he joneses on theater to the point of exhaustion.

Last week brought the premiere, in a campus play festival, of “Agape,” a one-act Kulczyk wrote about a love affair between two men who meet while their cars are stuck in a traffic jam. Meanwhile, not only was he running rehearsals for “The Altruists” and a short curtain-raiser on the same bill, “What I Meant Was” by Craig Lucas, but for another simultaneous production of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets that he was directing on campus. He also teaches an undergraduate intro-to-theater course that meets twice a week; during an evening interview in his office, a weary but still enthusiastic Kulczyk pulled out a thick folder of student papers he had to grade while also shouldering his directorial workload.

“I may be all melodramatic about [all the work], but I love being busy,” said the tall, thin, lightly bearded graduate of Estancia High School in Costa Mesa. “I’m tired, but it’s a good tired.”

“The Altruists” opened Thursday for a two-week, 12-show run. Next on the agenda, Kulczyk said, would be “sleep, sleep, sleep.” He had an inside track on that as well--after the opening, he needed only to trudge upstairs to his studio apartment in a graduate student dorm directly above the Grand Central theater.

“The Altruists” and “What I Meant Was,” Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 6:30 p.m. Matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends May 20. $10. (714) 278-3371.

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Cal State Fullerton will mount nine plays in its 2001-02 theater season. They are “Machinal” by Sophie Treadwell (Sept. 28-Oct. 14), the Frank Loesser musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (Oct. 19-28), Moliere’s “Scapin” (Nov. 2-11), “The Fantasticks” (Nov. 29-Dec. 9), “Arcadia” by Tom Stoppard (Nov. 30-Dec. 9), Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” (March 8-17), “Rosmersholm” by Henrik Ibsen (March 15-24), “Grease” (April 26-May 5) and “Rocky and Diego” by Roger Cornish (May 17-26). (714) 278-3371.

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A play born at South Coast Repertory, “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” warmed most of the New York critics in its recent Big Apple premiere at the Public Theater.

Jose Rivera’s play, first mounted on South Coast’s second stage in January 2000, depicts the fraying marriage of a career Army sergeant (John Ortiz in the New York production) and his unhappy wife (Rosie Perez).

The New York Times’ Bruce Weber, despite reservations about how Rivera mixed realism and fantasy, found it “a piquing nest of ideas . . . intellectually provoking enough to linger,” with “an affecting emotional climax.” The New York Daily News also gave a thumbs-up. Donald Lyons, writing in the New York Post, loved the character of the sergeant but panned everything else about “Dali”: “Rivera writes Benito . . . in a funny, patient, true voice that exposes the pseudo-poetic vapor that fogs up the rest of the play.”

Rivera’s script was published last year in “Latino Plays From South Coast Repertory,” the theater’s anthology of works developed through its annual Hispanic Playwrights Project.